On “The Carol Burnett Show,” Vicki Lawrence tended to play characters older than Burnett even though she is 16 years younger.
This was a function of Burnett’s prominence, Lawrence said in a phone interview. It just made more sense for Burnett to play heroines, ingenues and femmes fatale in various sketches.
When the show’s writers came up with Mama, Eunice and family, they intended for Burnett to play Mama.
But Burnett didn’t much like Mama, Lawrence said.
“She just felt like Eunice was more her, which was very upsetting to the writers,” she recalled.
Even worse, Burnett wanted to make the characters Southern so that the sketch would resonate with her Texas upbringing.
“The writers actually walked out the first time they saw it,” Lawrence said. “They didn’t like it. They told her, ‘You’re going to offend half the country. You ruined our beautiful sketch.’ But Carol was right.”
Lawrence based Mama on Burnett’s portrayal of Eunice and on a mother-in-law she had for a short time.
“Probably the mother that I drew the most on was my first mother-in-law,” she said. “I was married for, like, 10 minutes to a guy from Tennessee. And his mother was very Southern and had a lot of those same kind of speech patterns and vocabulary. She was very sweet, though. She was more like the ‘sweet baby, angel, darling, squeezing your cheek’ type.”
More than a half of a century has passed and Lawrence is still playing Mama.
She will bring her autobiographical and sketch-filled show, “Vicki Lawrence and Mama,” to the Honeywell Center in Wabash on Sunday.
The account of how Lawrence became involved in “The Carol Burnett Show” is one of the legendary stories of the entertainment business.
Lawrence was a teenager attending Morningside High School in Inglewood, California and wrote a fan letter in which she mentioned that people told her she resembled Burnett.
Unlike 99.999 percent of fan letter recipients, Burnett actually tracked her down and attended a Miss Fireball contest in which she participated.
Lawrence had been planning to become a dental hygienist and to marry a rich dentist, but she found herself instead participating – nominally, at first – in what would become one of television’s most renowned and timeless shows.
Lawrence said she came into the show knowing nothing about anything.
Harvey Korman became her comedic mentor.
“Carol had a show to run, so it was really Harvey that took me under his wing. I think it was either teach me or kill me.”
“I really feel like I went to the Harvard School of comedy in front of America,” she said.
Luck continued to smile upon Lawrence. During the show’s sixth season, a song written by then-husband Bobby Russell, “The Night That the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” went to number one on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart.
Lawrence said she would prefer to wait and tell the story of how that improbable musical happenstance came about to the audience in Wabash.
After Burnett decided to end the show in 1978, a TV movie called “Eunice” materialized which was co-directed by Korman.
This led to the TV series “Mama’s Family,” which lasted six seasons on NBC and in syndication.
Lawrence used to tell people that Mama was 69, but now that Lawrence is 76, Mama’s age has climbed considerably.
“As I get older, I find that I think more like her. You just get to a point where you really don’t have time to mince words. You just say what you’re thinking.”
Mama may say outrageous things, but no one who has ever been entertained by those outrageous things has ever complained.
“People don’t really get offended,” she said. “They just go, ‘She’s a crazy old lady.’ I think everybody, every family, has one of those. I feel like everybody knows her.”
Doing a live show is like “running a little half marathon,” she said, but some advice from relatives years ago made it a little easier.
“My sister and brother-in-law came to see the show, and he said, ‘You should sit. People are there to hear your stories. They’re not there to see you walk around.’”
“So, I actually sit for some of it now,” Lawrence said.
Lawrence and Burnett remain close.
In fact, Lawrence said just the other day she sent the following text to Burnett: “If it wasn’t for you, I would be cleaning teeth somewhere.”
“Vicki Lawrence and Mama” – $45 to $105, 2 pm Sunday, 275 W. Market Street, Wabash, 260.563.1102, honeywellarts.org
